Which alternative search engines do you use?

Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I've ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down).

Just simple searches like "Best gaming headphones" or "Realtek Driver Download" and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.

And you can directly define, which sites you'd like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.

Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.

And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit or to automatically open libreddit), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.

Lastly, I created a so-called "Lens", which allows me to search Lemmy / Kbin content only (also still have one for Reddit).
Meaning with one click, it shows me results from only sites or keywords I've defined - see image.

Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.

(copied from another thread I replied to)

I use DuckDuckGo, I forgot how to live without the search tags such as !yt, !fb, !w to search specific sites.

I have to shout out Wiby. It is focused on like weird personal websites from the early 2000s, that kind of thing. Absolutely not a general-purpose search engine, but mashing the "surprise me" button will take you to all sorts of fun places.

My top ones:

DuckDuckGo - may not be as private as they claim, but has been my go-to for years. Simple, but feature-full and still mostly decent for search.

Marginalia - a search engine that favors text heavy websites, perfect for research

Searx instance - not my main due to how spotty the instances can be and lazy to set up mine. But can basically grab stuff from all the "big" search engines, which saves a lot of time. I don't consider it a godsend like most people do, though. As since big engines can give poor results.

frogfind - a duckduckgo interface meant for older computers that converts webpages to basic html. Perfect for news articles and tutorials where you want to skip the "fluff".

Kagi.com no ads, private, you pay a subscription so they look for your interest instead of you being the product, has many customizations, very responsive company, very good use of AI, super fast, doesn’t require javascript, and many other things, just give it a try

I use you.com as it's centered on an ai chatbot and pulls in traditional web search results to augment it's answers. it works quite well.

might not count, but I use startpage, which uses google while allegedly keeping none of the info that makes google problematic
sometimes i use duckduckgo,

in firefox you can make a shortcut to type anything in any searchbar too, like so: (in this example I'll use kbin.social search)

We type something into search to get the exact url we need, that ends up being https://kbin.social/search?q=[something]
in this case [something] is obviously what we typed, so we save a bookmark of https://kbin.social/search?q=%s where %s swaps out what we type when we call to the bookmark
Then we give the bookmark a keyword that makes it easy to type, it can be anything but I'll just use kb
now whenever i type 'kb somethingsomething' it will search somethingsomething on kbin.social

I use this for youtube, arch wiki, the type-effectiveness graph on bulbapedia pages ( https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/%s(Pok%C3%A9mon)#Typeeffectiveness ), etc, etc

For general purposes I use Ecosia.

For a while I used Swisscows almost exclusively. They do an excellent job with privacy.

Due to a job I had, I moved away from it as I needed extremely specific information. As I write this, I'm thinking of giving it another try.

I have switched to Ecosia few days ago. No conplains so far. Its free, and builds off Bing IIRC.

I have been intrigued by Kagi, but Im not really ready to pay a sub for a search engine.

Honestly? Bing chat has been quite good to me if I have specific questions. It searches the web and gives me a summary.

In between Brave Search and DDG.

I use DuckDuckGo and it workw quite well and at least they say they protect your privacy (I am sure they do a better job than GAFAM/BigTech spyware mafia), but am looking for something better since I found out it has some agreement with Microsoft and I do not trust those spyware-producing convicted monopoly abusers at all.

Brave Search for the majority of things. Ecosia and sometimes Searx.

Duck-Duck-Go. Getting worse for privacy (allegedly) but it's been overall great for me. If I can't find what I'm searching for on the first page or two I just add a !g to the front to search an anonymized google for that query.

Startpage, google search results without ads, trackers but much slower, the slowness can get annoying sometimes when my internet speed is bad

Duck duck go cause I'm a basic removed

Unfortunately, still Google, with Bing a distant second. I've realised at least half of my searches are locale-specific, and engines like DDG are so American-centric. This is even with letting DDG use accurate location data. Reading the options here and hoping to find something I've not heard before that'll work and hopefully replace Google as my main search engine.

I personally use You.com, Mojeek and Startpage. All of them are great 👍..

Been using DDG almost exclusively (still need google occasionally) but noticed the quality on DDG has been decreasing with the ride of generative content. Anything travel or review related is just garbage.

I am learning so many things from this thread

Kagi

I'm sort of between search engines. I currently use SearXNG on my laptops and LibreX on my phone. These are metasearch engines, so they usually pull in more and better results than, say, Google alone. SearXNG is good because it's very private (depending of course on who hosts it); while LibreX is nice because it's simple, allows custom redirects for popular services (e.g. YouTube -> CloudTube), and it doesn't use JavaScript.

I think my crappy Android tablet uses Mojeek, but it's been a while since I last used it. I've also recently tried out MetaGer (rejected because some features required payment), Qwant (rejected because Privacy Badger saw a fair number of trackers) and SwissCows (rejected because of constant internal server errors).

The only thing missing from my current engines is filters for image search. Qwant and SwissCows let me specify the aspect ratio, vague size, colour, and license of the results. Mojeek, SearXNG and LibreX unfortunately do not offer this; which is why I'm between search engines at the minute.

In short, I use SearXNG and LibreX.

Kagi. Very happy with it. Best $5 it recently invested. Gives me much better results than Google and all the others.

• SearXNG
• When I need code snippets, I fire up Edge and ask ChatGPT.

Brave search works well, but I have the feeling they are playing with user's data otherwise I can't explain their business model